My sister is buying this “end of the world” stuff lock stock and barrel, partly because she is religious and his predictions fit in with her faith in some way, and partly because “all those events/things he points out couldn’t possibly be coincidence.” He talks about some huge disaster every 7 years and relates it to the Jews’ 70 years in Babylon and the concept of the “sabbath year” where every 7 years people don’t plant and the land is fallow, and then every 49 years is a year when everything is restored to its proper place, or something. I suspect that his review of recent history is highly selective, to prove his point to the gullible and eager.
So I don’t want to read his books, but if any of you have read his books and can provide me with talking points, that would be great.
Not that I expect to even try to persuade her that he is wrong but it would be nice to have something rational to say besides grunting noncommittally.
I doubt reason is going to work. Can you look up a bunch of equally convincing predictions of doom from the past to show her that none of them came true? With any luck she’d doubt his also.
Not the end of the world, but when there were UFO reports some of them might seem very convincing, with eyewitness tales of first contact and such. How can one disprove them all. Not all of them could lie, right.
In the 1890s there was a spate of sightings of airships (piloted by someone from New England) that were very similar. Sightings in the sky my multiple people and by reliable observers, close encounters of the first kind, etc. But none of it was true. Ditto for doomsday predictions.
I agree that she didn’t use reason to get to believing this, so she’s pretty unlikely to use reason to stop believing. Particularly if you’re trying to show her how she’s stupid and gullible (why would she be interested in that?).
Have a sympathetic talk where you try and find out why she wants to believe this What about her life sucks so much that she’s excited to think about it ending? Is it just boring and she wants something meaningful to happen, or something specific that she doesn’t want to deal with anymore? If you get there, then you have IMHO, some reasonable chance of getting her to realize she wants to believe this, at which point maybe you could (sympathetically) point out all the other ‘The World is Ending’ predictions that haven’t come true – not as a way of telling her she’s stupid, but as a way of saying ‘Don’t feel too bad; see, other people have wanted to believe this kind of thing, too’.
IF your sister is a Christian, have her read Mark 13, in which Jesus himself describes the end of the world.
Make sure she sees that Jesus himself said, “No one knows the day or hour when these things will happen, nor the angels in heaven nor even the Son himself, but only the Father.”
Got that? JESUS said the HE didn’t know when the end would come!!! If the time of the End could be divined by magic or by reading the Scriptures, don’t you think JESUS would know?
So, is Jonatahn saying he’s smarter than Jesus?
(Obviously, if your sister is NOT a Christian, this won’t help.)
Yeah, this is the only approach I could recommend. I am always puzzled by people who spend hours teasing out alternative interpretations and hidden meanings and yet miss the plainly - and repeatedly - stated “YOU WILL NOT KNOW!” :smack:
Of course, some people can get around this by being more vague. “Sometime this decade” is fairly narrow, but doesn’t name a day or hour. I suppose maybe that’s possible within the scope of the Bible… but if there’s anything with a worse track record of success, I don’t know about it.
The only other thing I could add is that end of the world predictions are pointless, at least in the Christian belief. The end of the world is described as “labor pain” - unpleasant at the time, but ultimately beneficial. The Bible doesn’t command people to prepare for it like it’s something to be survived. You’re supposed to prepare for it by doing the right things, or by living the right way, now.
So the only real take-away for believers is to go live your life to the fullest because you don’t know when it will end. I’m not sure that anyone could disagree with that conclusion.
I agree with this. It seems a lot of people who believe in doomsday stuff are anxious people, not because the doomsday stuff makes them anxious, but because they were already the type to worry and the end of the world stuff provides them a justification and focus. If I was in your place, I would talk to her and see what caused this new interest.
Also, I might play along and say that if it’s true and the world is going to end soon, what is she going to do about it? If she’s trying to get her life in order and spread the word of God that would be one thing, but if she’s giving all her money to scam ministers and taking her kids out of school and other things like that then I would be more worried.
I’d never heard of Jonathan Cahn before this thread. For those others who don’t know him either, he’s apparently most famous for the book The Harbinger, a novel that suggests that the 9/11 attack was a divine warning to the US. The Wikipedia link has the list of the “9 harbingers” from the book, that draw parallels between ancient Israel and the US, and you can see that they definitely sound like they are reaching. For example:
You could draw parallels between almost any attacks in any nations if this is your evidence, because there will be fallen bricks from almost any building that is destroyed, and defiant utterances from leaders saying that whatever was destroyed will be rebuilt.
And here is a somewhat lengthy critique of The Harbinger. It seems to be written by someone using the Bible as the reasons why The Harbinger isn’t true, so maybe that will be somewhat convincing, unlike if it was an atheist going into why it’s a load of crap. Here’s one paragraph that jumps out at me:
The article goes into fairly good detail, but it’s actually an abridged version of the book “The Harbinger: Fact or Fiction?” so if you really want more about how The Harbinger is not a book to be paid attention to, you could read that.
Good luck, I hope your conversation with your sister goes well.
Thanks, this is the sort of thing I was hoping for.
Sorry for my sloppy phrasing in the OP, as I understand it the book doesn’t predict the apocalyptic end of the world, but some disastrous event that would cause serious economic problems on a scale of the great depression possibly. So she is not at all welcoming death via the end of the world; on the contrary, she is going around to all friends and family and trying to persuade them to prepare to survive. Not really a prepper or survivalist either, something short of that. So since she lives in the country she is preparing to grow her own food, and is planning how to de-risk all of her investments. But she is spending an enormous amount of emotional energy on this issue, and if nothing else I wouldn’t be averse to providing some explanation of why I’m not buying into it.
[del]American Christians have been pulling this nonsense for close to 200 years. “The End Is Nigh!” they say. And then it isn’t. Maybe it appeals to people who don’t want to make responsible long-term plans.[/del]
Oh, she’s a prepper? I got out of evangelical Christianity before that was a thing. Sorry.
There’s a good article in the Nov/Dec 2014 issue of Skeptical Inquirer about what happens to the true believer people when the earth doesn’t end; aliens don’t arrive; etc. Basically they can’t admit that they were wrong and their belief actually strengthens!
In similar circumstances, I state my thoughts on the subject and refrain from arguing. Some of my glib reasons for not arguing include “Don’t argue with fools. They have much, much more practice”; "Who is the bigger fool: The fool or the person arguing with the fool?; and “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. You won’t accomplish much and it will irritate the pig.”
Of course I’m all for reasoned debate and exchanges of ideas, but often it doesn’t take long to figure out that the person is locked into an idea and isn’t going to budge.